Workshop with Maria Murnane: "I need help with book marketing!"

In this fun workshop, award-winning novelist Maria Murnane will teach you how to build a solid foundation for your book marketing campaign, and she’ll also share a ton of creative ideas that won’t cost much more than your time. Whether your book is fiction or non-fiction, traditionally published or self-published, this session will show you how to get it into the hands of your target readers!

What attendees will learn:

· How to build a foundation for your marketing campaign

· How to tap existing and new networks to build credibility and a fan base

· How to spread the word to a larger audience

· How to avoid mistakes that will cost you time, money and readers

About the presenter:

Maria Murnane is the author of the award-winning romantic comedy Perfect on Paper, which she has dedicated to any woman who has ever been on a really bad date or realized halfway through the workday that her skirt is on backward. The book was initially turned down by several major publishing houses, so Maria self-published and implemented a creative, grass-roots marketing campaign in an effort to prove the publishing houses wrong. And it worked! Within a year Perfect on Paper attracted the attention of senior executives at Amazon, who chose it out of more than 10,000 self-published titles for the company’s venture into traditional publishing. They offered Maria a contract, and in 2010 an updated version of the novel was released by the AmazonEncore imprint in the United States. Since then it has also been published by Random House in Germany and Alexandra Publishing in Hungary, and Maria has signed on with the same Hollywood film rights agency that represents the authors of Capote and Legend of the Guardians. Maria’s next book, a sequel called It’s a Waverly Life, is scheduled for release by Amazon Publishing in November 2011, and she has recently begun writing a third novel in the series.

Maria has been invited to speak at the Harvard Women’s Leadership Conference, the Massachusetts Conference for Women, the Baltimore Book Festival, and Temple University’s conference for entrepreneurs. She has also been featured in USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Money, Shape, and PopSugar.

An honors graduate of UC Berkeley, Maria also received a master’s degree in integrated marketing communications from Northwestern University. In addition to working on her own novels, she offers consulting services on publishing and book marketing to share what she has learned with other authors. More information is available at www.mariamurnane.com

This event will be hosted by Mary Kennedy Eastham, M.A., MFA – author of The Shadow of a Dog I Can’t Forget and the upcoming novel Night Surfing.